Ingomar: The Jersey Lilly and the Wool Capital That Burned

Ingomar started as a Milwaukee Road depot town in nineteen oh eight and grew into one of the most productive sheep-shearing centers in Montana, shipping huge quantities of wool. Then, as the story goes, a fire burned most of the town, sparing only the brick bank. Homesteaders arrived in the decade after the railroad was completed, but the land proved too dry for intensive farming, and the town was already in decline by the nineteen twenties.

That bank building is still standing. In time it became a bar, and a man named Bob Seward later took it over, renamed it the Jersey Lilly, and is said to have started a tradition of serving free Christmas dinner to anyone in the county who showed up. Its old back bar is said to have been shipped out from Saint Louis by wagon and riverboat. Ingomar today has a population measured in the single digits, but the Jersey Lilly still opens its doors, still serves the bean soup, and remains one of the more unlikely surviving institutions on the northern plains. The railroad line through here was abandoned in nineteen eighty. Three of the surviving buildings, the Ingomar Public School, the Bookman General Store, and the Wiley, Clark and Greening Bank, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. All of it stands along United States Route twelve in Rosebud County, in open, semi-arid country.